How do you partner with the various marketing teams to ensure a successful product launch?

PMM is hard (and awesome) because we are a hub, not a spoke that often controls the final outputs. We’re not growth marketers, or demand gen manager, or brand marketers. However we do influence, inform, manifest, and/or articulate growth strategies and campaigns. Product marketing needs other growth teams to commit and execute. Same goes for traditional demand gen and campaigns – we have a bit more influence there and ability to define demand programs and contribute content, but still heavy reliance on others for execution (campaigns team, ops, etc.). We don’t own channels or many of the teams required for execution.

Our role and responsibility are to develop (and coalesce) a GTM (and specifically marketing) plan to propose to cross-functional teams, surface the requirements/dependencies/roles, and coordinate and monitor the cross-functional workstreams. That GTM marketing strategy– along with positioning/messaging, enablement, launches, and research input into product strategy – are our core roles and responsibilities. Product Marketing can bring together all the growth/demand investments into a single view (ex. a Campaign Brief), come to the table with recommendations, and aide in the orchestration of various teams efforts (expose leverage points or conflicts). We can create messaging and content that supports the campaign. But we can not also be the sole execution side (not our expertise, not our area of ownership – literally don't own the distribution channels). This is part of what makes Product Marketing so hard.  We’d love to work with Growth to help them refine their programs and tactics, and contribute to areas like messaging (ex. copy for an in-app test, or keywords and copy for SEO/SEM programs).

• Understand that everything they plan is based on their cross-company relationships and develop your own cross-disciplinary relationships - not just with Marketing. 
• Develop long-term relationships and maintain regular and continuous communications with all stakeholders. 
• Do the same with senior leadership across the organization. 
• Know the team leads; know their challenges; know their plans and programs. 
• Remember that they have more than just product launch on their plates - make sure you're there to help them with their other projects so far as you can. 
• Communicate early and frequently for every planned launch.